HIGH HEELS ON A WINDOWSILL: THE DEFINITION OF REVOLUTIONARY SUCCESS<\/span>: I haven\u2019t got much to say about Before Night Falls, Julian Schnabel\u2019s lush biopic about Cuban gay\/dissident writer (the adjectives are interchangeable) Reinaldo Arenas. If you know the basic outlines of the guy\u2019s life, you know what to expect, really. <\/p>\n I will say that the one major objection I had at the start of the movie\u2013why are they talking in heavily-accented English, rather than either Spanish or accentless English?\u2013ultimately struck me as a really interesting choice. It started to make sense for me during the class in Russian, and then there was the scene with Arenas and the exiles speaking in French: Using heavy accents is a way to express the position of an island caught between America and the Soviet Union, with no<\/span> sense that her own language is adequate to the political world of her times. The accents also, of course, make Cuba\u2019s global marginalization mirror the internal exile of the homosexual. If you don\u2019t speak Spanish you will miss some of the movie\u2013although an English-speaker can probably guess the meaning of the mural of Castro, with the slogan, LA HISTORIA ME ABSOLVERA\u2013but mostly I think the decision to make the movie in an inherently marginal and alienating accent was the right one.<\/p>\n The final moment of violence, well\u2026 if it really happened then so be it and I\u2019m sorry. If it didn\u2019t, putting it in your movie seems to me like a gross concession to the American revulsion from suffering. I would say more but don\u2019t want to make it too obvious what happens; suffice it to say that I think the treatment of suffering-in-Cuba and suffering-in-America would have been much deeper and more complex had this thing not happened.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" HIGH HEELS ON A WINDOWSILL: THE DEFINITION OF REVOLUTIONARY SUCCESS: I haven\u2019t got much to say about Before Night Falls, Julian Schnabel\u2019s lush biopic about Cuban gay\/dissident writer (the adjectives are interchangeable) Reinaldo Arenas. If you know the basic outlines of the guy\u2019s life, you know what to expect, really. I will say that the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1071,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-424","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n